One of the quirks of being in a physics department is receiving long rambling emails from random strangers claiming they have found a theory of everything. This emails are of course spammed to everyone in the department and conveniently never have any evidence or math in them. One of the most memorable emails I have received was one where the guy claimed he not only disproved Einstein and quantum mechanics but had built a device that was "capable of knocking a category 4 hurricane down to a 2."

This made me wonder: do meteorologists get these sorts of crackpots spamming them messages? If so, what are the most memorable crackpots you have seen?

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I know I can't straddle the atmosphere...just a tiny storm in your teacup, girl.

I've gotten a small handful, the most memorable was one who had a theory on the water cycle that water vapor was actually decomposing into H2 and O in the upper atmosphere and then explosively recombining, and if we would just listen to him it would solve all of our energy balance issues.

I've had the biggest problem in social settings were I'm plagued by the anti-climate change crowd who thinks they can go toe to toe with me after reading a few op-eds written by the energy lobbies. The most memorable there was where someone who enough to be dangerous was telling me that climate change had to only be cyclical, because the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would only create a 0.3% increase in global heat budget, but the one degree Celsius change in X number of years was a 3% change in heat budget (1 degree on a 30 degree average global temp). I still remember his face when I pointed out that Celsius is not an absolute scale, and if you measure one degree on Kelvin it comes out to a....0.3% change.

When I worked for NOAA we'd get letters from 2 guys (pre-Internet conspiracy dopes) who kept claiming hurricane seeding was a plot of one type or another. Eventually the FBI told them to cease and desist, after they showed up at the office...